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UFO sighting above Table Mountain

About two weeks ago I went over to my parents house and as I was leaving, my mom said to me “Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you, we saw a UFO last night.” – she said this so casually as if this were a daily occurrence.

I wouldn’t call myself a UFO enthusiast by any standards, but I was brought up in a very open-minded Ukrainian family. Having grandparents who grew up in tiny remote villages in rural Ukraine, UFO’s were always spoken about as fact in my household.

My grandfather was raised in such a remote area that UFO sightings were some of the most common and interesting occurrences in the night skies. Throughout his life, he has been a firm believer in not only the existence of extraterrestrials, but also the contact they sometimes choose to make.

My parents couldn’t care less for UFO’s, though they have never questioned their existence, to them, UFOs existence was also fact. When my family moved to South Africa, I was suddenly surrounded by people who disregarded anything alien or UFO related, simply because they believed there was no solid proof. That there was no way that something of this nature and this magnitude would be hidden from the general public. Thus, I grew up questioning everything. In one way, a skeptic, always asking for proof, in another way a believer in the possibility that we on this tiny little planet in a massive universe cannot possibly be alone.

I am by no means a promoter of the concept of alien existence, I am just open to the possibility of it.

What my mom described to me could be anything you find in hundreds of YouTube videos. A bright light, as if a stadium projector light, but far in the distance.

Now my folks have lived in their house in Milnerton since 1997, they know what the sky above their house looks like, and they aren’t senile yet, so I’m pretty confident they didn’t mistake this for a bright star or an airplane (which they see fly over their suburb daily).

My mom continued, saying that she called the rest of the family to come have a look and that they all saw it. The object held a stationary position right above the Atlantic ocean (the coast is less than 1km away from their house). It was bright and it was big. It held its position for long enough for the entire family to get bored and go back inside. My mom said that after a little while she looked outside again, but the bright light was now gone, with absolutely nothing replacing it in the nights sky.

I played it off as nothing, because after all, I wasn’t the one who saw anything and their eyes weren’t as good as mine.

On November 28 2013, somewhere between 10pm and 11pm, I was taking my dog outside before bedtime. I looked over to the brilliant view we have of the city from our apartment in Lagoon Beach, and there I saw exactly what my mom had described two weeks prior. A big and bright light, hovering right above Table Mountain, high above it, but still close to the city. The light was brighter than any of the city lights, brighter than any stars, and also significantly bright than an airplane we saw pass by in a different direction. I called my boyfriend, who is a skeptic of anything he hasn’t seen with his own two eyes. He saw this too. It boggled his mind. I immediately knew it. We were looking at a UFO above Cape Town city center, directly above Table Mountain. The longer I stared at it, the more I was convinced that the light ora around it seemed like some sort of an organic flow of colour.

My still skeptical boyfriend, who happens to be a photographer, grabbed his professional camera and started snapping. Once we zoomed into the photos, we found that the ball of light was perfectly round. And it had a minuscule ora of light, a purple that we couldn’t find anywhere else in the photos. This wasn’t a light trick, this was just plain strange.

We looked at it from several angles, at one point we even saw a fog or mist, or perhaps even a cloud passing over the light. Even in its most dimmed state, over shadowed by mist, it was still brighter than any other visible light, including a light house and Cape Town Stadium itself.

It held its position for a good while, maybe 15 minutes. I kept going backwards and forwards, at short intervals, seeing if it was still there or not. Until the last time I looked back at where the light was and it was no longer there. There was no lights anywhere in the sky. It had simply vanished.

At the time I was still in disbelief. It just seemed too incredible to witness. No way had I just had my first UFO sighting while taking my dog for its nightly toilet walk. Even as I write, I’m trying to rationalise any possible explanation. My skeptical friends have offered a few up, such a Jupiter being bigger and brighter, or drones flying above the city. But I know my nights sky. I have lived there for many years and I am a star gazer, I know what I am supposed to see when I look up at night and this light just doesn’t make any sense.

Last night, December 3rd 2013 at, my boyfriend ran in from outside and signaled for me to come and have look, as he said “It’s back”. What we saw last night was even more interesting.

There it was, same size, same spot above Table Mountain. And then within seconds the light started to get smaller and smaller, still bright but now tiny, until it just disappeared into thin air within seconds. A couple of minutes later it re-appeared in the same spot again, but also went from a very tiny orb to a much larger one, almost as if it flew away on a perfectly straight trajectory and then flew back from very far away – all within seconds.

At this point we took note of the time, it was 10:14pm.

Within moments it disappeared in the same way again. I stared for another minute, examining every visible corner of the nights sky. And then I saw it again, fading in, getting larger as if from far away and quickly getting closer. But this time it was in a completely different place and much lower. It seemed as if it were only meters directly above Signal Hill, It stopped, hovered for a split second longer. Then I saw what seemed like two giant beams of light, maybe five times the size of the round object itself, project out to the side left at an up at a 10 o’clock angle and in an instant it was gone with no trace. The direction that it seemed to go was up, but I cannot be sure of this.

I’ve questioned my own slighting non-stop since its happened… but no explanations seem to fit, at least not after lats nights sighting.

I have since done a bit of research and have found people posting about similar sightings in Cape Town all throughout the past month.

Please let me know if you guys have heard of anything to explain what I saw, or if there are more similar sightings that can shed a bit more light on this occurrence than what I’ve encountered.

Attached are two photos. One is a photo my boyfriend snapped on the 28th, this was a longer exposure so it makes the nights sky look brighter than it appears in reality. For this reason I’ve also attached 2 photos that I took at the same time with my iPhone, which show more realistically what we were looking at.

8 thoughts on “UFO sighting above Table Mountain”

About 2 months ago I was in my garden in Hout Bay when I noticed a white
light coming from the west (atlantic ocean ) which I thought it could be a plane but rather bigger.It then stopped completely and hovered for about 2 minutes or so!
It then disappeared !!
Cant be a plane nor a flare !

I know this may seem wacky because it is New Year’s Eve after all, but despite the clear, still night and the lights from the Grand Parade and the fireworks at the Waterfront, my husband, our son, our friend and I all saw an unusually bright orange light moving smoothly and silently in a vertical direction in front of Table Mountain on the Devil’s Peak side just before midnight (we live in Woodstock and are in line with Devil’s Peak, so our perspective may have been affected). As we watched, it vanished. I don’t mean that it faded away, but that it was highly visible and then just gone. While we were speculating about what we had seen, discounting a helicopter (no noise, only one light) and light aircraft (too smooth, too vertical and no flashing light), the light reappeared just above the Southern Cross – it was still as bright as it was before – and seemed to move away towards the east before disappearing once again. We agreed that our perception of ‘movement’ may have been the result of our imaginations, although I still find it unlikely that we all imagined the same phenomenon at the same time. I have experienced group hysteria before and it was completely unlike the situation I have just described.

I am skeptical about UFOs and UFO sightings, but would like a rational explanation of what we witnessed this evening. Any ideas?

We have on a few occasions seen strange moving lights at night on devils peak..move too quickly to be torch lights and on nights that are cold and misty too…We live in devils peak so have a good view..what could it possibly be? Definitely not helicopters or small airplanes..very strange indeed

We have on a few occasions seen strange moving lights at night on devils peak..move too quickly to be torch lights and on nights that are cold and misty too…We live in devils peak so have a good view..what could it possibly be? Definitely not helicopters or small airplanes..very strange indeed

One night I was in the park walking my dog(Mowbray, Sybrand park) I looked up at the sky and suddenly saw 5circling bright white lights. This thing was bigger than any plane I’ve ever seen and it certainly was no flares, planes past my house at a regular rate, so I knew this was no plane and a plane can’t move that fast. It was hovering above Devils Peak and literally a second later it was above the Mountain of Constantia. Then hovered for like 1minute then vanished out of thin air. I have no idea what I saw but I want to know!